The circular economy is an economic model that contrasts with the linear "take-manufacture-consume-throw away" culture. It seeks to convert waste into resources and incorporate them into a new cycle.
The European Union, according to the European Parliament's own data, generates 2.1 billion tons of waste per year, generated by sectors such as agriculture and livestock or households. And, although, according to Eurostat data on the comparison between 2004 and 2022, there is still a lot of work to be done to reach the objective set by the European Union: to have a "carbon neutral, environmentally sustainable, toxic-free and completely circular economy by 2050".
In addition to the European Union's action plan, which is often a condition for other policies, the member states have drawn up their own strategies with revisable objectives that respond to the diagnoses of each reality.
Novadays designed the Spanish Circular Economy Strategy 2030, which serves as a roadmap for the path that Spain is setting in this direction, with a multidisciplinary organizational model that integrates all agents of economic activities.
Thus, in order to transform the economic model, it is necessary that the concept of circular economy transcends and becomes a transversal axis and the basis of all economic and consumption activity from its conception, also in public administration.
To facilitate the implementation of the circular economy principles in the different phases of public procurement, Novadays has designed the tool Circular Procurement Suite which has resources that help the contracting profiles to evaluate the proposals according to these criteria of circularity and sustainability, so that they can contribute to the goal set by Europe.
Circular Procurement Suite and this article have been elaborated in the framework of the project "Digital transformation of public procurement processes to boost Circular Public Procurement" (EXP/EC/2023/00313), which is a beneficiary of the call for grants to boost the Circular Economy in business for the year 2022 in the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR) funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU.